Название: Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World Автор: Clive Thompson
Издательство: Penguin Press
ISBN: 0735220565
Год: 2019
Страниц: 448
Язык: английский
Формат: epub, mobi, pdf (conv)
Размер: 10.1 MB
Hello, world.
Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving cars roaming the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of code—and coders are the ones who built it for us. From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, how they think, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. They are the most quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture.
In pop culture and media, the people who create the code that rules our world are regularly portrayed in hackneyed, simplified terms, as ciphers in hoodies. Thompson goes far deeper, dramatizing the psychology of the invisible architects of the culture, exploring their passions and their values, as well as their messy history. In nuanced portraits, Coders takes us close to some of the great programmers of our time, including the creators of Facebook's News Feed, Instagram, Google's cutting-edge AI, and more. Speaking to everyone from revered "10X" elites to neophytes, back-end engineers and front-end designers, Thompson explores the distinctive psychology of this vocation—which combines a love of logic, an obsession with efficiency, the joy of puzzle-solving, and a superhuman tolerance for mind-bending frustration.
In the fall of 2015, we had another one of those Skynet-like moments when a form of artificial intelligence utterly destroys a human. In this case, it involved “AlphaGo” - software designed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of the Google empire—playing a wickedly great game of Go. To test their AI, DeepMind had arranged for it to play against Fan Hui, the European Go champion. It was no contest: The computer won 5 games out of 5. A few months later, AlphaGo fought Lee Sedol, an even more elite player - and again, AlphaGo dominated, 4 to 1. AlphaGo was so good at the game partly because it incorporated “deep learning,” a hot new neural-net technique that let the computer analyze millions of Go games and, on its own, build up a model of how the game worked; feed any board with Go positions into the model, and it could, in conjunction with a more traditional “Monte Carlo” algorithm, then predict a future move.
Deep learning was becoming the hot new high-tech trend. It was also something that was becoming increasingly easy for everyday coders to try out. That’s because, at the same time that Google was unleashing AlphaGo on the world, it had also released TensorFlow, a free piece of software that greatly simplified the task of setting up your own neural net. Say you wanted to create your own system for recognizing the faces of the employees at your firm, so that the front door opened only for them. If you could get lots of different pictures of each employee, you could train a TensorFlow neural net to autorecognize each one and run it through a webcam at your front door.
At the same time, the book deftly illustrates how programming has become a marvelous new art form - a source of delight and creativity, not merely danger. To get as close to his subject as possible, Thompson picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding skills as he reckons, in his signature, highly personal style, with what superb programming looks like.
To understand the world today, we need to understand code and its consequences. With Coders, Thompson gives a definitive look into the heart of the machine.
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